Once upon a time, I had all my configuration, writings, web pages, in RCS. Then I moved it to CVS and set up my own central cvshost and kept my data safe. Then life moved on, and I stopped committing my stuff, mostly because I got lazy. I set up other forms of backup, and thought that was enough. At work, we moved from CVS to Subversion. I didn't make the change at home. The world moved on to git and other distributed systems, work stayed at Subversion, and home stayed at CVS that went inactive.

I've been doing a lot of web development and lately have come to realise my danger. Sure I have backups (I hope), but I have no way to trace the history of what I have done. So I decided to get Subversion working. But first I thought I would check my CVS repository. And that was a complete failure. At some point in recent years, I moved my server to a new machine and I did not set up CVS. I have no access to the old stuff. I wanted to set up CVS again and I could no longer remember how it's done. Once an old piece of software gets superceded, it sure slides off the landscape quickly. I got it working, and now have access to it, but I wanted to make a note in case I ever need to do it again. All the help I needed came from here: CVS Installation Notes.